Flower's Dev Diary (Week of November 12th)

[Foxy Boxes]

The realisation has just kicked in; spiders, just try to climb that wall, I dare you!
(For clarification 'that wall' is made of concentrated hellfire and is itself, on fire.)

[Ceunon]

Fiery phallus, anyone?

[Ferrus.Manus]

Well I always knew I wanted this since Conc. Hellfire blocks were introduced, I just thought it wasn't possible due them not having their own Block ID. I guess I was wrong.

Fiery phallus, anyone?

[Sarudak]

Well I always knew I wanted this since Conc. Hellfire blocks were introduced, I just thought it wasn't possible due them not having their own Block ID. I guess I was wrong.

I'm fairly certain it only became possible when Flower decided to modify the base class for blocks which was quite recent.

[FlowerChild]

I'm fairly certain it only became possible when Flower decided to modify the base class for blocks which was quite recent.

Yup, exactly. Why this happened now was that I also moved a lot of the code that governs the flammability of blocks into block.class (where it should have been to begin with..yet another OOP fail in the MC code) while working on the update.

For the more technically minded, what I've been doing for the past little while, is moving a lot of my base-class mods for the various vanilla blocks into child classes of those blocks instead. Now that I'm modifying block.class, I'm then able to instantiate my custom child classes for those blocks instead of the originals. This also doesn't mess with any existing MC code, since any "instanceof" checks (of which there are an unfortunate number in the code due to other OOP fails) will return the appropriate result since I'm always inheriting from the original blocks.

I did a bit of that during the initial 1.4 update, now I'm doing another round of it. I generally reserve such large refactors for version updates, as they have a tendency to mess with existing installs of the mod and create tech-support headaches. I also try to space them out a bit so I don't do them all in one big soul-crushing mass ;)

Anyways, I basically spent most of the day doing that for various blocks, and I'm almost done with all of them. Obviously, I'm doing this to save myself time in the future when porting to new versions of MC.

Speaking of fire...I just noticed a lovely new vanilla bug, that even had me run back to a default install to make sure I hadn't caused it myself:

Turns out if you're standing near a torch, you'll have little flame particles jump all over your screen. Good times.

This was supposed to be a bug fix release, right?

[Sarudak]

Maybe it was just a bug focused release? :P

[FlowerChild]

Maybe it was just a bug focused release? :P

No, I think it was more someone that doesn't really know the code very well or who bothers testing his own changes (i.e. playing the game) "fixing" stuff while simultaneously breaking other stuff.

I noticed while doing the port that some changes had been made to particle rendering, and was wondering what was being accomplished there. Guess I just found out. If this is what we can expect from the upcoming rewrite of MC's rendering code...I'm afraid.

And seriously...how the fuck does something like that get missed with 2 pre-releases leading up to it? 1.4.5 anyone?

[walker_boh_65]

And seriously...how the fuck does something like that get missed with 2 pre-releases leading up to it? 1.4.5 anyone?

I see a good 2 *public* patches coming out for 1.4.x. Any bugs that they did get rid of, were just replaced with new ones which somehow the bug tracker missed. . .weird.

[Benanov]

For the more technically minded, what I've been doing for the past little while, is moving a lot of my base-class mods for the various vanilla blocks into child classes of those blocks instead. Now that I'm modifying block.class, I'm then able to instantiate my custom child classes for those blocks instead of the originals. This also doesn't mess with any existing MC code, since any "instanceof" checks (of which there are an unfortunate number in the code due to other OOP fails) will return the appropriate result since I'm always inheriting from the original blocks.

Having a lot of integration points without a defined API is a bad thing, and it warms my heart to see you spending time on this, so you can spend more time doing awesome stuff and adding new content instead of reapplying existing mod content on top of Mojang's changes.

Turns out if you're standing near a torch, you'll have little flame particles jump all over your screen. Good times. This was supposed to be a bug fix release, right?

Not to increase your blood pressure another 10 points, but it's a known bug in vMC (even Notch is seeing it) and there will be a 1.4.5 release to fix it sooner rather than later. :(

[FlowerChild]

I see a good 2 *public* patches coming out for 1.4.x. Any bugs that they did get rid of, were just replaced with new ones which somehow the bug tracker missed. . .weird.

It makes me wonder how much of this I should try to fix myself. The item thing I definitely need to take care of, especially since they have a tendency to not care what they do to technical builds, but I think I will try and ignore everything else I come across to avoid wasting a shit-load of time on stuff that they'll hopefully fix anyways.

Super frustrating man.

[FlowerChild]

Not to increase your blood pressure another 10 points, but it's a known bug in vMC (even Notch is seeing it) and there will be a 1.4.5 release to fix it sooner rather than later. :(

Do you have a link to confirm Notch has commented on it? I'd be interested in knowing if he's currently taking a look at MC again given the rumors mentioned earlier in the thread about him being dissatisfied with recent releases.

If he is looking at it, that tends to support that rumor.

[Anbaric]

If only we could stick Jeb and Dinnerbone in some gimp suits and threaten them with heavy iron screws to stop breaking Notch's wonderful game...

[walker_boh_65]

Super frustrating man.

I can understand that, each release you push the rock up the mountain, only for it to roll back now for the next update cycle.

Do you have a link to confirm Notch has commented on it? I'd be interested in knowing if he's currently taking a look at MC again given the rumors mentioned earlier in the thread about him being dissatisfied with recent releases.

If he is looking at it, that tends to support that rumor.

There are rumors that Notch is looking at MC again? I don't remember hearing anything recently, unless I missed an important tweet or two.

Side Note: "important tweet" those are two words I never would have imagined myself ever thinking together.

[FlowerChild]

I can understand that, each release you push the rock up the mountain, only for it to roll back now for the next update cycle.

Yeah, it's a pain in the ass to be sure. I think what I may do is take an extra day or two on this update (I was planning on releasing tonight) and spend the extra time trimming down my base class mods as much as possible.

If I'm going to have to do this again in a week or two, I may as well take the time to make that as painless as possible when it happens.

Now is an ideal time for such things, as I've yet to port over to the server, which basically amounts to a small version update in itself. Hence, all the changes I make now don't have to be done in two separate places.

Honestly, I think this pre-release cycle on bug-fixes is overkill. I can understand it for full releases, but for these kind of bug-fix releases I think that rapid turnaround would be much more useful than having to wait a couple of weeks before the changes are finalized. Having to wait two weeks for what should be a ten minute fix is rather ludicrous.

[Svartwolf]

hey! Jeb may have some problems and certainly the latest updates have been tons of missed potential, but he raised the sky limit of minecraft, and i will always love him unconditionally for that : c (seriously the sky limit was the single thing I hated most of minecraft of olde) jeb will be always on my heart, for he showed me that the sky was never (almost) a limit <3

now on topic, I really like the idea of burning concentrated hellfire.. i was just looking at my stacks of concentrated hellfire blocks and wondering what kind of aesthethic building i could do with them. now this will come as a great plus : D, add a little of the new chopping block for the bloody tiles at the floor and we are set!

and FC have you ever though of sending mojang an email with some constructive criticism regarding the lack of direction? I think that you aren't the kind of guy who likes to mess in others works and you probably hate that other people mess with yours. but in various posts you've made i have read extremely well though criticsim to the root problems of minecraft, and if i were mojang, it's the kind of thoughs and opinions i would really love to hear.

oh, and take your time, seriously, this mod have to be the one that is most frequently updated in all MC one or 2 days more or less is nothing to wait.

[FlowerChild]

You know...one interesting thing I'm finding about moving these base-class mods into my own child classes is that it's making me much more open to further modifying vanilla behavior.

The fire thing discussed above is one example, but while creating a child class for a small sugar-cane base-class mod I had, I just decided to allow planting of sugar-cane diagonally to water blocks because it's a tiny thing that's always bugged me about the game. I saw the code sitting there for it and just had a "fuck this" moment with it.

Anyways, it's interesting in that doing this refactoring seems to be opening me up to subtle change to vMC design that I wouldn't have considered before due to the hassle of maintaining those changes in future releases. I really hadn't anticipated it having that effect on me.

[CumuloNimbus10]

The fire thing discussed above is one example, but while creating a child class for a small sugar-cane base-class mod I had, I just decided to allow planting of sugar-cane diagonally to water blocks because it's a tiny thing that's always bugged me about the game. I saw the code sitting there for it and just had a "fuck this" moment with it.

It's amazing how small changes like this are so significant. That has always frustrated me considering you can plant anything else on blocks diagonal from water. Thanks for this!

[FlowerChild]

It's amazing how small changes like this are so significant. That has always frustrated me considering you can plant anything else on blocks diagonal from water. Thanks for this!

Yeah, it's a very small thing, but looking at the placement code I was reminded of the dozens of times I've clicked to place reeds diagonal to water only to have it fail. It's one of those things that no matter how often you do it, you always wind up mucking it up and getting momentarily annoyed.

Anyways, I'm looking forward to seeing what other impact this has on me in the future. I suspect there are a lot of little things like this in the code that I've never changed because the annoyance of it as a player didn't outweigh the annoyance of me having to maintain the code with each version update.

[Benanov]

Not to increase your blood pressure another 10 points, but it's a known bug in vMC (even Notch is seeing it) and there will be a 1.4.5 release to fix it sooner rather than later. :(

Do you have a link to confirm Notch has commented on it? I'd be interested in knowing if he's currently taking a look at MC again given the rumors mentioned earlier in the thread about him being dissatisfied with recent releases.

If he is looking at it, that tends to support that rumor.

Well, this is the bug report, and I retraced the web of links I had followed to make sure it was the right one...and I thought I saw him comment on this bug, but it's not there. I must be mistaken, or read someone else's nick as "Notch" or the comment was deleted. I cannot back up my assertions.

https://mojang.atlassian.net/browse/MC-2497

[FlowerChild]

Well, this is the bug report, and I retraced the web of links I had followed to make sure it was the right one...and I thought I saw him comment on this bug, but it's not there. I must be mistaken, or read someone else's nick as "Notch" or the comment was deleted. I cannot back up my assertions.

https://mojang.atlassian.net/browse/MC-2497

Well, thanks for that link anyways as someone posted a code sample there on how to fix it with a very easy change. Will definitely add that to the next release :)

EDIT: 2 minutes later, and...ah...sweet sweet lack of fucking particles flashing everywhere.

Seriously dude...thanks again for posting that link. I either would have had to spend a fair amount of time digging in the code to figure out what was going on, or every BTW user would have had to put up with that garbage for the next couple of weeks. The explanation in the thread made a whole lot of sense, and made fixing it a two minute job. Both me and the community owe you for that.

[Benanov]

Seriously dude...thanks again for posting that link. I either would have had to spend a fair amount of time digging in the code to figure out what was going on, or every BTW user would have had to put up with that garbage for the next couple of weeks. The explanation in the thread made a whole lot of sense, and made fixing it a two minute job. Both me and the community owe you for that.

You're quite welcome. I saw the code change, but didn't make the connection that you'd be able to apply it just as well as Mojang could*; I was just owning up to my mistake.

It'll be quite nice to have the fix in early. Happy to help.

* Upon reflection, you're able to apply it faster because you're working directly with MCP output and they have to go through one more deobfuscation step. Price one pays for using an obfuscator.

[FlowerChild]

* Upon reflection, you're able to apply it faster because you're working directly with MCP output and they have to go through one more deobfuscation step. Price one pays for using an obfuscator.

Nah, I didn't copy/paste anything. It's mainly his explanation of what was wrong that I used, and Mojang can apply that just as easily.

The problem was that they were updating particles before they were initializing them, which was resulting in them having random positions when first rendered. Simple as that. However, I would have had to dig through a lot of code and figure out exactly what it was doing before spotting that for myself.

[FlowerChild]

Ok, *looks* like I'm done with the port. However, I'm way too burned out at the moment (I think I put in around 15 hours on this thing today) to do the final round of testing and package a release, so I'm going to have myself a night of sleep to make sure there aren't any last-minute problems.

I also don't think I'm in any shape to handle any emergency releases should the need arise :)

So far though, the client and server seem to be working perfectly. After playing with it a bit, I scrapped the new item block-collision code entirely, and reverted to that in 1.4.2. I'll either take a look at it down the road and see what can be done with the new stuff, or leave it as is until Mojang fixes the issues with it.

Anyways, we're in the final stretch. Should have no trouble putting this out sometime tomorrow.

[Cuchonchuir]

The design of MC's bosses on the other hand seem to want to avoid the fact that they're *in a game largely about building*. Both bosses destroy blocks in such a way that basically makes constructing an area in which to fight them next to impossible. I see there are a few suggestions on the wiki for structures you can build, but as far as I can tell, the design of the Wither was intended to specifically discourage the building of structures to help defeat it.

So, they basically take the construction aspect out of the game temporarily, which is rather lame in a game that features that aspect as one of its primary strengths.

Anyways, I would have much preferred if building was incorporated into the boss design, rather than trying to eliminate its effectiveness.

This, so much. IMO, fighting the bosses with weapons should be almost an exercise in futility; building some kind of clever trap to destroy them should be the primary way of fighting them. It just fits the theme of the game and plays to its strengths so much better.

Like, just as an example, what if the Wither could only be killed by dropping anvils on it?

That's not a suggestion, and I know it's not a brilliant idea or something, it's just an example of what, IMO, would have fit the game better.

[azagal73]

Maybe it was just a bug focused release? :P

And seriously...how the fuck does something like that get missed with 2 pre-releases leading up to it? 1.4.5 anyone?

Well they just announced pre-release 1.4.5 (due for release 20th November)

Unfortunately we have to patch Minecraft again, this time to fix the broken LAN server functionality. Good news is that this only affects the client, so 1.4.5 clients will be able to play on 1.4.4 servers without any problems.

Fixes included:

Clients now get the correct IP for LAN servers
Fixed the incorrect positions of some particles
… and fixes for MC-2507, MC-2508, MC-2500, and MC-2498